Archive for the 'Today In Ironfleet' Category

Lost a gank Caracal cruiser today in a pickup Alliance group. Guy had a wormhole with a Catalyst destroyer in it, we jumped in with several small ships, found what amounted to a bait camp. We were chewing up the bait drake rather nicely when several of his friends arrived. I was on the wormhole when they primaried me, but lost my ship when I flailed the interface and failed to jump in time. No big, it was cheap and fully insured.

Later, I was in a Buzzard, looking for targets for a larger gang. Found a wormhole that seemed to have transitory targets, so I scanned out the deeper wormhole they were traveling into. That was interesting.

In there, they had a Thanatos carrier that was piloted, had fighters out, and was sitting outside a well-defended POS. They also had at least five or six other active pilots. An Imicus nearly caught me when we both bounced to zero on the same planet (he was 3,500 meters away and didn’t decloak me) and by the time I decided to leave, they’d put an Onyx heavy interdictor on the exit wormhole. When I jumped through, they had a Hurricane waiting on the other side. None of this was sufficient to catch my Buzzard covert ops ship, but it was an impressive display of the “Unwelcome” mat.

My time in Faction Warfare coincided with the peak of the nano-frenzy, when everybody and his brother was in a Vagabond going so fast that the game engine could barely cope. Our Caldari blob of Drakes and Ravens and Caracals was often hard pressed by these fast-movers, and we developed a considerable hatred of them. Every now and then we’d get a kill on one of those boys, and there would always be much rejoicing.

Of course, that was long ago, and there have been many changes since then. But still.

There was a TEARS roaming op tonight, another wormhole dive in search of unwary targets. I joined up some two and a half hours late, due to a conflict with my dinner hour and some quality family time. By the time I joined, the FC sounded weary and rough (I think he’s been sick).

I found a wormhole, and the gang converged on me. The FC jumped in to scout for targets. He found at least two POSs there, along with various parked ships and (he said) a piloted Orca, sitting safely inside POS shields. After just a few minutes scouting, he declared the system free of targets and announced that the op was over. Then he jumped out, docked, and logged.

Well, for me the op was just beginning, so I jumped in (in my stealth bomber) and began snooping around for something to shoot at. I figured if I found something, I could get a few other TEARS guys to jump in after me and help kill it. I was specifically hoping that the Orca might do something stupid. Not very likely, but in EVE I’ve found that you sort of have to make your own luck. It might be true that “there’s no way to get a kill in this ship against that target” if the other guy doesn’t screw up, but in my experience, the other guy often does screw up, and if you aren’t hunting him when he does, you won’t get him.

Great minds think alike, and it turns out that Khalia Nestune and Lian Xander from Suddenly Ninjas were similarly interested in spending more time in this wormhole. They were flying a Malediction interceptor and an Ishkur assault frigate.

We snoop around. No sight of the Orca, but there’s a guy in his pod somewhere, and various unpiloted ships inside POS forcefields. A couple of haulers, and once I got a Helios on scan, which explained the combat scanner probes visible on the directional scanner. We were directional-scanning, since none of us had combat probes available.

After about ten minutes of random warping around and snooping, we decided there was nothing to be found without combat scanners, and it was agreed that I’d go out to known space and pick up my Buzzard covops. I entered warp to the wormhole.

At that moment, Khalia began shouting that the Helios at the wormhole and (miracle!) pointed. Turns out he warped in uncloaked (why?) and Khalia was able to burn over and point him (about 30 kilometers from the wormhole, again, why?) before he could cloak.

I’m not sure where Lian in the Ishur was — also at the wormhole I think — but they were already burning the Helios pretty hard by the time I came out of warp. I was able to lock and get a volley of torps launched, but the Helios popped before my torps ever arrived:

Nice! I can’t imagine what MulaSoldats thought he was doing, but I don’t much care. Of course we tried to catch his pod, and of course we failed. And right then…

A Vagabond (which, for any of you fortunate few who don’t know, is a very expensive and very fast and very deadly T2 heavy assault cruiser) dropped out of warp right on top of Khalia and Lian, who by this time are close to 50km from where I am, which is right on the wormhole.

Now, a fully T2-fitted and rigged Vagabond chattering autocannons at you from point-blank range can be a terrifying thing when you’re in any frigate-sized vessel. So, I don’t blame Khalia for shouting at us to run away. I think he’d have warped out himself, only, he was pointed. So of course he began burning away from the Vaga. I said “no, kill him!” (easy for me to say when I’m parked on the wormhole for quick escape!) and began launching butt-slow torps. Lian attacked with drones and guns.

From there on out everything happened very fast. My torps started arriving, Khalia was speaking urgently of where in armor he was, I noticed the Vaga was finally targetting me, I was praying for one more volley to hit, somebody was saying “I’m in structure, I’m gone”, I got volley of torps that hit for more than 2k damage, there was lotsa yelling, I heard “I’m dead!” and then the Vaga was a wreck.

It turns out, Khalia had less than 20% structure left on his interceptor. I think (not sure) that he got out of scramble range and was using his speed to tank (badly but well enough) the Vaga’s guns, which presumably were in deep falloff by then. If Khalia did have a chance to leave and didn’t take it, I’m very impressed. Brave!

I’m not clear whether we ever had a point on the Vaga, or whether the pilot was just overconfident and planning to melt faces. I believe Lian had a point, but I’m not sure if the Ishkur is fast enough to keep a Vagabond pointed for long — I just don’t know. Like I said, it all happened very fast. Whatever the details, I was pleased to see that we suffered no losses, except maybe in the soiled-underpants department.

We speculate that maybe the uncloaked Helios was a badly-set trap; I’d been cloaked at all times and they may have thought they could bait the other two frigates and kill them both with the Vagabond. If so, they timed it badly (considering how fast the Helios popped) and were surprised by my bomber. But still, they should have had tactical initiative at all times, and I can’t figure out why they squandered it the way they did.

I suspect the pair of large shield extenders didn’t do him any favors when my torpedoes began striking home. I am fitting a target painter, and against his shields, I was doing between 440 and 720 points per volley. My sixth volley, which broke into his armor I think, landed for 945 points; and my seventh volley did an astounding 2096 points. I wonder if he may have pulsed his micro-warp drive, giving him the sig radius of a small sun? Then my next volley landed for a thousand points (taking him to half structure) and my last volley popped him.

All in all, the best fight I’ve been in lately, and the best killmail I’ve seen since my FW days. All thanks to Khalia and Lian!

There’s a young Ironfleet member named Dingo Indere (I think he might be some sort of distaff cousin of Jim Bridger’s) whose only joy in EVE is to mine for gas in a Badger II. AFK. In w-space.

There’s a certain Leroy Jenkins logic to the whole thing. He’s got 900k skill points, he flies a Badger II that costs what, 200k ISK? And he loads it up with modules that reduce his scannable signature down to the size of a frigate. A new clone costs him forty thousand ISK when he gets podded. And even at the current low prices, every gas cloud is worth millions of ISK, for close to zero effort.

Usually, though, he mines late at night, in the quiet hours before the server goes down. Today he tried it bright and early on a Friday morning, which is not quite so quiet. Thus, when I logged in, I had this in my corporate losses window:

Just a w-space update and data point: Today, for the first time since the patch that greatly reduced the number of sites (radar, ladar, gravimetric) spawning in w-space, the Greater Mars system is down to wormholes. There are two wormholes present in the system, and no other cosmic signatures whatsoever.

Last night some of the boys from TEARS wanted to put together a light fleet to go hunting into some wormholes. I showed up in a new-model stealth bomber, which (since the last patch) now shoots torpedoes (range-enhanced to about 60-80 klicks depending on skills and rigs) and fits a covert ops cloak. A bunch of bonuses have also been tweaked, with the idea being to focus the ship as a stealthy small ship with a DPS role against battleship-class vessels. (This being dramatically different from the platform’s historic role as an anti-frigate ship and its more recent neither-fish-nor-fowl role since the speed and missile adjustments impacted its ability to instapop smaller and faster targets.)

This was my first chance to fly one in a combat situation, so I spent much of the day tweaking up a fitting I could live with, and also scanning for a few wormholes we could hunt in later. When the fleet finally came together, it was very small; the composition varied a bit as players came and went, but for most of the evening we had a covert ops ship, we had an electronic attack frigate, we had me in the bomber, we had a heavy interdictor, and we had one or two recon cruisers. So we were set for tackle and ECM, but were light on DPS for the number of ships present. (My understanding is that a couple more bomber pilots were supposed to join us, but didn’t make it for various reasons.)

The first wormhole we entered was quite busy, and we ended up with a lot of traffic hitting our bubble in just a few minutes. Some got away, but we took down two different battleships, including a Dominix with godly armor repping who really erred badly; if he’d sent his Ogre IIs after me, it might have been a sad story. But he didn’t, and he died. I was quite pleased with the damage contribution that the bomber brought to those kills.

During this flight my fleetmates kept saying over voice “Why doesn’t he put those drones on the stealth bomber?” Which I didn’t consider a friendly suggestion at all! But, I was thinking the same thing.

There followed a long wander through a chain of three or four wormhole systems, but we found them all to be uninhabited. By the time we worked our way back to our starting location, we were near to calling the evening over, and we were already diminished by the departure of a couple of our most sleepy pilots.

Before we wrapped up, though, we scattered to check some of our previously-found and previously-empty wormholes. Warping around cloaked in mine, I found a Drake on the directional scanner, and using the directional scanner, I had him fairly well localized by the time the rest of the guys arrived in the adjacent k-space system. It was puzzling, though, because the Drake was not fighting sleepers (at least, there were no wrecks visible on d-scan) and was not probing (no probes on d-scan anywhere in system that I could reach, anyway). So, what was he doing there? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Somewhere in here there was a quick debate about whether we had with our remaining ships enough firepower to kill a heavily tanked Drake, which (to my gratification) ended when somebody said “No worries, if we get him locked down we can torp him to death.”

So I warped back to the wormhole, jumped out, and vectored the rest of the fleet to my wormhole. The covert ops jumped in and went hunting, working from my vague “somewhere in the vicinity of Planet I” report.

Everybody with a cloak jumped in, cloaked up, and took up a position on the wormhole. The covert ops got probes on the target, then cursed and said the target had vanished. So he had the interdictor jump in and bubble up the wormhole, in case the Drake was en route to the exit.

We waited, but no Drake.

Eventually one of our guys went to the most distant planet, where he saw the Drake on scan. Just as he reported the Drake vanishing from his scan, the Drake showed up on our wormhole at the edge of the bubble.

(An aside here: it’s my understanding that a bubble dropped by a heavy interdictor is supposed to be visible, like the ones you see around anchored bubble generators, or like a force field. But last night, I could not see our bubble, even though everyone else could. Is this an overview setting that I’ve got wrong, or some sort of graphics glitch? Obviously I’m not pleased at the concept of invisible dictor bubbles; all suggestions gratefully received.)

And then, like a switch, the Drake vanished. The wretch had cloaked!

There was much cursing, and our faster movers of course went blazing toward his last known location. By some miracle (or perhaps the Drake pilot panicked and dropped cloak in an attempt to warp) he quickly reappeared, and just as quickly, locked down.

I was gratified to see my torp volleys hitting him for 2,000 and more points per volley; and he blew up with respectable dispatch:

And with that, we called it an evening. I think all told we bagged two battleships, the Drake, two pods, and one pod ransom, with all loot and proceeds going into the TEARS war chest.

As for myself, I confirmed that the new-model stealth bomber remains an effective and fun ship to fly. It’s still paper thin, just as it always was; and it now flies against bigger ships at closer ranges, so overall peril has gone up. But it still brings the pain, and with the covert ops cloak capability, the pilot has an enormous amount of discretion about which fights to participate in. I also found that it serves as a functional auxiliary scout, without in any way threatening the primacy of the covert ops ships in their famous scouting role.

Last night, for the first time since I started working in Greater Mars, a Magnetometric site spawned, one called “Forgotten Perimeter Gateway.” I’m sad to say that it proved something of a disappointment.

I went in, in the usual way, in my Drake. The initial spawn was four cruisers; after I killed the second one, I got a spawn of a battleship and four frigates. Foolishly, I concentrated on the battleship, and when it died, I got another spawn consisting of two more battleships and two more frigates.

So, by now I’m out of shield and out of cap and there are ten Sleepers on the field: 2 BS, 2 cruisers, 6 frigs. They had me surrounded and outnumbered … it was time to warp away, rest, and recover.

Back, at range. Picked off the two cruisers before the damage got out of hand. Was just killing the second one when I noticed an Imicus and four Sisters core probes on my directional scan. They are in my w-space, scannin’ my dudez!

Warp away, rest, recover, ask the Empress of Greater Mars to scan down the Imicus. She tries, reports back that there are no hostiles in system. What, they left already?

Back to the mag site. Come out of warp and there’s the Imicus, 40 klicks away. (Empress, you are fired as my backup scanning minion.)

Targeted the Imicus, or tried to; but of course this is a Drake, and he’s long gone before the lock is obtained. Nobody else on directional scan, I gamble on finishing off the rest of the frigates.

Now we are down to 2 sleeper battleships, which is a substantial but not impossible nut to crack for my Drake. Assuming no enemies land on my head…

First, back to the POS, swap into my Buzzard, sweep the system carefully and competently. No ships on scan, no hostile probes out, maybe he really did leave the system this time.

Back into the Drake, back to the Mag site. Launch all the drones to increase DPS and soak some up too, start chewing on the first battleship. Keep weather eye on d-scanner. First battleship pops just before my shields go, I can tank the last one, we are done with Sleepers. Will I be unmolested long enough to do the archeology, or will my Imicus friend come back with reinforcements?

In the event, nobody came back. But the loot was a disappointment. In addition to the usual ship droppings, there were eight archeology cans, from which I got 9 ancient relics to be used (if I understand it right) in reverse engineering the blueprint copies for making Tech III subsystems. They were:

Unfortunately, my spies in Jita tell me these are none of them worth as much as a million ISK on the current market. Given that the wrecked hull section I found in a Radar site sold for 300 million, I was hoping that a Mag site would have some valuable stuff too. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about TIII production to understand where the bottlenecks are. I’m also uncertain how developed the market is yet; if production chains are still gearing up, it might be that items are in surplus temporarily until demand builds. At any rate, I’m not selling these for trivial prices; I’ll hang on to them until the market is fully developed, for better or worse.

So there I was, cruising through the cosmos in my Drake, a little bit of Caldari steel jazz blowing on my pod speakers, quaffing Quafe Ultra with a shot of Gurista Dark Rum and feeling not a care in the world. I’d swept Greater Mars for hostiles and, finding none, hopped in the Drake to blow up some Sleepers at a cosmic anomaly, one of two in the system. Mellow fun, no stress, just mindless carebear kaboomski time, communing with my heavy missles. Fly, my pretties, fly!

That was the plan. However, this IS w-space. One keeps one’s eyes on the sensors.

Thus it was only mostly unexpected when a casual sweep with my directional scanner showed me three sleeper wrecks and a Ferox.

I expected to see him when I lumbered out of warp, but he wasn’t at my destination. So, I figured he must be at the other anomaly.

I wanted to be sure, though, because you don’t get a lot of second chances when you’re tackling with a Drake. So, back I went to the Greater Mars headquarters POS, where I hopped in my Buzzard for a quick scout.

First I popped four probes at 32 AU range, overlapping where I thought he’d be. Sure enough, I got a hit. So I went all the way down to 1AU and moved the probe indicators to cover the suspected location. One fast scan, 100% hit, instantly mashed the probe return button. Bookmarked the Ferox and hopped back in the Drake. Launched that bad boy at my bookmark like a dumptruck full of bricks down a steep icy hill.

Dropped out of warp about eleven klicks from the Ferox. Locked him up. I’d activated my warp disruptor and missile launchers before I came out of warp, but for some reason they deactivated instead of firing when lock was complete, I’m not sure why. So he got about five free seconds while I waited for my modules to activate, before I noticed I wasn’t shooting. Then I said a dirty word and hit the buttons again.

The extra GTFO time I gave him apparently wasn’t enough.

He was engaged with a Sleeper battleship and two cruisers, and was down at maybe 20% shields when I got my lock. He didn’t last long, even though all three Sleepers started shooting at me as soon as my first volley hit the Ferox:

The Sleepers were hitting me hard, so I didn’t even try to catch his pod. He was cool about it, making an “easy come, easy go” sort of remark in local before (presumably) hitting the wormhole back towards home.

As you can see, it was a cheaply fit Ferox, so not too much of a loss for him. I enjoyed salvaging his wrecks, after I finished off the anomaly for him.

Greater Mars was quiet today, so after some desultory probing in a couple of adjacent w-systems, I decided to take a holiday at home, visiting my home base and fittings hangar to play with my stealth bombers and my ECM ships, since they all need refitting after the recent patch.

Well, after a long day of that, I decided to do some high-sec probing, since I’ve been in w-space pretty much constantly since Apocrypha released. I was curious to see how the new probing system would work for finding salvage opportunities.

Pretty soon I picked up the spoor of a whole swarm of drones and battleships at a moon, which is an odd thing to see in high sec. So went to have a look-see. What I found was about a dozen heavy ships from the Habitat Against Humanity alliance, with members from The IMorral Majority [BADD] and Squirrel Horde [NUTSS]. They appeared to be having a long and happy POS-stomping party; there was a Dread Gurista tower going down and a whole lot of shooting going on.

What caught my eye, though, were a number of Giant Secure Cans scattered about; several of the battleships were snuggled up to them, and they had names like “Antimatter L”.

Now, it’s unfortunate that ever since Apocrypha gave secure cans their new graphics, it’s no longer possible to tell whether a can is anchored or not unless you have functional color vision (which I don’t). But there was such a chaos of ships and drones, I thought it highly unlikely that anybody took the time to anchor their ammo cans. So, off I went for a cargo vessel.

I chose the humble Badger — not even a Badger II — because I thought there was some chance somebody might be willing to suicide me in a fit of pique, and I wanted to deny them any satisfaction for any such berserker insanity. And besides, it was funnier that way.

First load, I got two Giant Secure Cans, with no sign that anybody saw me. By the second load, the tower was down, and they noticed when I scooped can #3. Suddenly I had two battleships targeting me.

You go, boys! I love a good Concord show. Meanwhile, I steered toward can #4. Unfortunately, it was in the process of being scooped by Klendaxor in a Bustard. (He was a BADD member until yesterday, so it looks like he dropped corp so he could supply today’s operation with impunity from any tower defenders.)

Back at base, I checked out the contents of my cans. One was empty — no surprise since I came along near the end of the tower shooting. But the others? One of them had twenty five thousand large anti-matter rounds in it, which is a cool three million ISK in anybody’s book. The other was even better: 16,000 Bane Rage torpedoes, worth about eight million ISK on the current market.

There having been a lot of loose unclaimed drones floating around, I went back in a fast scooping frigate. This attracted a lot of blinky yellow boxes from assorted battleships, but they were cleaning up drones rapidly, and all I got was a single Hammerhead II.

Finally, reasoning that they might have taken this tower down in order to put their own up, I went back in my trusty Prowler and prowled for a while. But in the interim, they’d already anchored a small tower, and (though I watched carefully while they onlined it and got the forcefield up, writing this blog post in the meanwhile) they didn’t show any inclination to drop anything else for an ambitious salvager to scoop.

In the last couple of weeks there’s been a substantial decline in visitors to Greater Mars. I figure, the w-space novelty has worn off, the deadliness has been discovered, and the loot (especially the T3 parts) hasn’t turned out to be excessively valuable, especially before widespread T3 production gets ramped up.

Still, I like it here. And there’s not really a lot of extra resources in Greater Mars to share with tourists. Which means, I tend to treat tourists as just one more salvageable resource. And if they aren’t quite ready for salvaging, well… that’s what heavy missiles are for, right?

Today’s pilgrim showed up a planet while I was testing the new scanning features. He stayed there while I:

1) I scanned him down to 100%;
2) Warped to him to observe him;
3) Bookmarked him;
4) Returned to the POS operated by the Empress of Greater Mars;
5) Swapped into a combat ship;
6) Warped back;
7) Locked him with a cruiser;
8) Blew him to hell.

I realize it’s tough to keep moving while you scan when you’re in a non-cloaking astrometrics frigate, but jeebers, this ain’t Empire! It’s not safe to park at a planet.

Update: I didn’t notice until later, but after Devon warped away in his pod, he wrote one word in local: “ass”. Of course, I couldn’t say whether he was describing himself or trying to smack-talk me.

My EVE time has always fluctuated, and right now it’s on a downturn; so I’m not spending as much time in Greater Mars as I was. This, of course, means there’s more chance for interesting sites to respawn.

Tonight there were two new ladar sites to check out — and mine gas from, though my gas mining inclinations are slight. What caught my attention, though, is that these ladar sites had more robust sleeper defenses than used to spawn in sites (with the same name) in this system. One site had a spawn of six frigates, which is one frigate more than I’ve seen at a gas site previously; the other site actually had four of the Sirius gun towers. Ladar sites this size have, in the past, had the same defenses as gravimetic sites in this system; typically either five frigates or a cruiser plus three frigates.

I haven’t really seen enough ladar sites to know for sure that there’s been a change, but I’m wondering whether there might not have been a server-side tweak to randomize sleeper defenses just a smidge. That’s a change I’d be 100% behind; it’s bothered me ever since Apocrypha that a site with a given name would always have the same defenses, and that when you killed the defending sleepers, they would always have exactly the same loot and drop predictable salvage from the same small salvage table. I really think there should be more variability.

Anybody else see any unexpected Sleeper spawns in the last couple of days?